To Make A Long Story Short
by Gunney
Summary: "It's a long story" is never a good enough explanation. And everybody has a story. A fic losely based on the idea of stories, that has taken on a mind of its own.
1. Chapter 1

Colonel Hogan closed his eyes and basked in the intense heat from the sun. He could smell it baking the leather of his jacket and roasting the surface of his skin. The air around him was still dense with moisture from the last snow storm, but the wind had finally died, the temperature warmed, and for the first time that March it smelled like spring.

Distantly he could hear Carter and Newkirk arguing over the clatter of shovels and picks, LeBeau and Olsen were chittering over a story that involved a woman with very little in the way of reserve. The story had one of the guards leaning in intently, even though the man barely spoke ten words of English.

Hogan smirked knowing that LeBeau's hand motions were likely to be enough to properly tell that story.

A low chuckle sounded near the colonel's shoulder. "It is good to see you smiling again, Colonel Hogan." Schultz said amiably, sidling up to the open truck cab where Hogan had chosen to station himself.

The American colonel took a deep breath and opened his eyes, wincing at the stab of light that reawakened a not long dormant headache. "Have I not been smiling, Schultz?" Hogan asked lightly, craning his still sore neck to look at the guard. He shifted in the creaking leather seat, repositioning his elevated ankle with a soft grunt, before he looked out over the roadway full of working prisoners and loitering guards.

"It is hard to smile when you have to spend so much time in the cooler. And with a hurt ankle." Schultz commiserated. There was a subtle reprimand in his tone that Hogan smirked at, before closing his eyes once more and soaking up the sun. Schultz sighed, leaning against the truck. "But the sun is shining, the weather is warm. There has been no more monkey business."

The guard fell silent for a moment, shifting through his pockets before he found his watch and declared, "And…it is almost lunch time."

That got a short laugh from the colonel, but he kept his eyes shut. "All is right with the world, eh Schultz?"

"Alles in ordnung." The guard confirmed, coming unconsciously to attention and raising his chin proudly.

"No Gestapo to worry about."

"Oh…thank heavens for that." Schultz laughed in agreement.

"No Colonel Klink hanging over your shoulder."

"I am grateful for that too."

"And nobody trying to escape through that gap in the tree line." Hogan muttered, absently, pointing in the direction of said gap without opening his eyes.

"And nobody trying to escape through that-" Schultz cut himself off, the words catching up with his brain and his eyes at the same time. He caught a flash of red scarf and brown wool seconds before the little Frenchman disappeared from view.

"LeBeau! Where are you-!" With a jump and shout Schultz took off after the little Frenchman, redirecting two of the remaining three guards to go with him.

While the fourth watched the commotion curiously, Carter and Kinch scrambled to the truck, each taking a position on either side of the colonel and helping the man to hop, hobble and scramble the fifty-yards to the ditch leading down to a tiny stream on the opposite side of the road.

With spring melt the stream was a little less tiny, but easily crossed. The three men scrambled into the woods with diminished grace, disappearing completely from sight as quickly as possible. By the time Schultz returned with the wriggling Frenchman shouting feisty epitaphs in his native language, his heart dropped at the sight of the empty truck seat.

"Oh no…not again, Colonel Hogan." Schultz whined, then turned on LeBeau angrily. "What happened? Where did he go?"

"Where did who go, Schultzie?" Newkirk chimed in, coming up to stand behind the Frenchman.

"Colonel Hogan…" Schultz demanded, then started counting heads and added, "Kinchloe! And Carter!"

Newkirk and LeBeau looked around themselves in bewilderment.

"Hey, has anybody seen the colonel?" LeBeau asked loudly, prompting a chorus of responses that ranged from surprise to earnest concern.

As the men started searching in the trucks, under rocks, and through their pockets, Newkirk scanned the tree line intently sidling up beside Schultz. "Well he couldn't have gone far with his bum ankle, could he?" The Englander remarked. "Maybe he's just gone to the upper."

"In the middle of an escape?" The big guard demanded, one eye closing enough that it looked like the other might pop out of his skull.

"Escape? What escape?" LeBeau asked facetiously.

"YOU were trying to escape. I saw you."

"Me!? I would never escape. I was just hunting for mushrooms."

"You are not supposed to be hunting for mushrooms. You are not here to be hunting for mushrooms. You are here to fix the road." Schultz reprimanded then barked, "Now where did they go?"

"They'll be right back, Schultzie, they've just gone to retrieve somethin'."

"Yes, don't worry. They'll be back in time for roll call."

"What?"

"Colonel has to get his rest after all, it's been a hard couple of days." Newkirk said, his tone implying that he was trying to be comforting. The words weren't quite doing the job however.

"Oui, and when he gets back I will use these mushrooms to make him a nice, soothing soup." LeBeau said, patting a pocket.

Schultz was starting to vibrate, and his face was growing red; a shade that Newkirk was certain he'd never seen on the guard before.

"Schultz?" Newkirk prompted, sending an earnestly concerned look to his fellow conspirator, before he jolted at the sound of the giant guard exploding.

"I have had it with your monkey business!" Schultz screamed before he stepped back far enough to point his gun at the two prisoners closest to him. The fact that it wasn't loaded seemed not to register as the man continued to yell. "Get into the truck! All of you!"

"Schultz, calm-"

"SCHNELL!" Schultz screamed, his voice breaking as the pitch exceeded anything Newkirk had heard him reach before. "Get into the truck…and any monkey business…and I will SHOOT….to…"

"Schultz?" LeBeau ventured, stepping closer to the big man as his words and movements ground to a halt. He was staring awkwardly at the ground, the aim of his rifle falling as he leaned forward. The German guard's face had grown ashen, his eyes wide open in silent shock.

"I think we broke him…" Newkirk muttered, in awe up until Schultz started to list toward the ground. The awe turned to concern and Newkirk rushed in where angels wouldn't dare, shouting for help.

In moments the falling guard was surrounded by enough prisoners and soldiers to be lifted into the back of the truck. Ignoring the protest of one of the guards Newkirk stepped up into the back and knelt beside the sergeant of the guard tearing at the top buttons of his coat, then his shirt, desperately fighting his way to the skin on the big man's throat. He felt for a pulse, deliberately avoiding Schultz's gaping open eyes.

"Was is los..?" One of the guards was demanding, struggling to see around Newkirk's hunched form.

"You bleedin' idiot, get in the front and drive." Newkirk shouted over his shoulder, hearing the words repeated in LeBeau's German. He recognized the word "krankenhaus" and "schnell", but the rest was lost to his subconscious until the truck vibrated to life and LeBeau's knees dropped into view near Schultz's head.

Newkirk's hands were shaking so hard he couldn't tell if the faint beat he felt was from his own heart or the German's. He shook his head, but kept his fingers resting lightly against the clammy skin bracing against the jostling of the road.

"Is he alive, Newkirk?" LeBeau asked, anxiously, not bothering to analyze why he cared, or if he should care.

"I c…I can't tell.." Newkirk shook his head, then was tossed to the side as the truck hit a crater, one of the many that they had been ordered that morning to repair. Banged about, Newkirk rocked back to his knees and clung to the side of the truck shouting an angry curse at the driver that he was sure the panicked Kraut wouldn't hear.

LeBeau had managed to brace himself before the jolt and was pressing his ear against the German's chest, his expression not providing much in the way of hope. Newkirk watched, feeling his stomach drop, before he was tossed back towards the guard by another nasty bump.

The truck rocked dangerously, two of the wheels rising off the ground a few inches before the other two climbed out of the rut and the truck again rested on all four. This time he couldn't control his descent and Newkirk landed with his elbow and torso slamming into Schultz's chest. LeBeau just barely got out of the way in time to avoid being crushed.

The Frenchman did manage to force an arm under Schultz's limp head when it rose, and winced as the big man's cranium slammed against his forearm on the way back down. A second later a heavy wheeze escaped the man's throat and his eyes bulged further open before snapping shut. Picking himself up, Newkirk scrambled to find a pulse again, and this time located an erratic but powerful beat.

LeBeau watched as the big man's chest rose and fell, hitching halfway through the breath before he exhaled, then inhaled again.

"He's alive…" Newkirk muttered, gasping for breath himself, as if the effort of his lungs could provide the oxygen Schultz needed. LeBeau collapsed back onto his butt, then braced against the wall with an out flung hand, unable to take his eyes off the big man's rising and falling chest.

"Let's hope he stays that way…" LeBeau muttered before his gaze met the Englishman's.


	2. Chapter 2

"Was that a truck engine?" Out of breath, and doing his best to ignore the pain radiating from his ankle, Hogan pulled Kinch and Carter to a stop and turned his head and torso back toward the road.

"Yeah." Kinch said, just as breathless from the exertion and adrenaline. "Do you think Schultz sent somebody back to camp?"

"That doesn't sound like him." Carter said, his face contorting in concern.

"Those guys were supposed to keep everybody at the road!" Hogan shifted, moving his arm from Andrew's shoulder and grasping hold of the man's collarbone. "Carter, get back there, fast as you can. Make sure you aren't seen, but give me an idea of what's going on. Kinch and I will keep moving."

"You got it!" Carter said, snapping a salute before he took off through the undergrowth.

"Come on, Kinch."

"Don't you think you should r-"

"Don't start with me..." Hogan warned, reaching for a slender trunk in front of him and pulling himself and Kinch forward.

It took Carter about ten minutes to get to the road and back. In that time Hogan had managed another hundred feet or so. He was keeping the pain from his voice, but couldn't do much about the excess sweat on his brow, or the occasional wince. Kinch was about ready to once more push the boundaries when Carter scrambled through the bushes. He was coming from the wrong direction, but his apparent ability to consistently get himself lost went unnoticed when he started spouting.

"Boy, you're not gonna believe it. I heard one of the guard's talkin'. They're packin' everybody up into that extra truck and headin' back for camp. Langenscheidt is in charge and he says that.."

"Wait a minute, Langenscheidt? What happened to Schultz?"

"He fell down." Carter said.

"So was it a truck we heard, or an earthquake." Hogan quipped, then immediately regretted it when Carter's face fell. "What happened, Carter?"

"Schultz had an attack of some kind. LeBeau and Newkirk got him into one of the trucks and ordered the new guard to take them to a hospital."

"Aw no." All the energy that Hogan had been storing up for this final leg of their mission drained out of him in one go and he leaned a little heavier on Kinch.

"What do we do, Colonel?" Carter asked, looking sullen.

"Hope." Hogan said finally after a long silence. They couldn't turn back. He was the only one that could locate the supplies and information that he had hastily buried. Their contact had demanded that Papa Bear, personally, be the one to make the drop. The underground had been walking on egg shells lately and there had been too many leaks. Too many deaths. The end justified the means, but not if something permanent had happened to Schultz. "Come on, let's get this over with."

* * *

The arrival of the ailing German sergeant at the hospital inspired a rush of action from nurses, orderlies and doctors. The new guard looked like he was going to wilt under the pressure. Newkirk almost felt sorry for the man as he was bombarded by questions from the doctor, harassed about the weapon that he kept brandished at Newkirk and LeBeau, then pestered about the truck that they had left parked directly in front of the main entrance.

LeBeau and Newkirk were torn between concern for Schultz and concern for the mission that had just become all the more complicated by the medical emergency.

"What more can we do?" LeBeau was saying under his breath. "We're still officially under guard, and Corporal Willmutt doesn't have the backbone to do anything on his own."

"Not without somebody else orderin' him to do it." Newkirk agreed squinting at the white faced corporal who was still trying to explain what had happened. Newkirk had tried more than a few times to explain the situation but his English had been ignored. Prattling in fluent German was likely to draw too much attention.

"Shouldn't be long before somebody puts in a call to the ol' stalag." Newkirk muttered, pointing leisurely toward the reception desk where a stout, brown-haired and be-spectacled Frau loomed.

"Do you think Klink will come out?"

Newkirk felt a shiver go through him, remembering the look on Schultz's face. The color draining from his head, his eyes frozen open. He was a Kraut, but Newkirk couldn't help remembering that he was also a father and a husband. "It's bad enough, he just might."

The Brit felt LeBeau make himself a little smaller, tucking his chin to his chest to stare at his idle feet.

Newkirk glanced to the down turned head fairly certain he knew what was going on in the Frenchman's head. He slung his arm over the smaller man's shoulder and heard Louie sigh.

"It's war, you know? People get hurt, people die. Sometimes because of us. But..."

"We hardly ever see the white's of their eyes..." Newkirk said thoughtfully, realizing a second later that he had meant it literally as well.

A few minutes later Corporal Willmutt, finally released from the grilling, wandered in mild shock over to where the two prisoners stood, and leaned against the wall beside them taking a slow deep breath.

"You haven't been in the army long, have you, Fritz?" Newkirk asked, not sure why he felt the need to poke at the man.

It wouldn't have mattered. Wilmutt gave him a blank look, clearly not an English speaker, then paced away from the wall to salute the Frau at reception. The woman gave him a stern disapproving glare, waiting silently as the guard made his request. A moment later she stepped away from the desk and waved the guard behind it, giving him access to the phone.

"Like a proper non-com, makin' a call to the kommandant the first chance he gets." Newkirk commented, crossing his arms over his chest.

"What do we say about Kinch, Carter and le colonel?" LeBeau asked.

"Maybe we can cover for them in the confusion."

"And if we can't?"

"Hope for somethin' better."

* * *

The goods were right where they were supposed to have been.

"They're soggy, but the water tight packing held up well enough." Hogan settled the rubber-band wrapped pack inside his zipped jacket, wincing at the cold mud that started to soak into his shirt.

Kinch stood, wiping his hands free of mud and wet leaves. "Did you bury the parachute here too?"

"Nah. I crash-landed about a mile up that way. Didn't bother to bury this stuff until I was certain I wasn't going make it back for roll call."

"Do you want me to go lookin' for it?" Carter offered, sounding all too eager to go running off again.

"No. A parachute buried in the woods isn't as suspicious as a parachute being unburied by escaped POWs. It's fine where it is." Hogan shifted, felt pain blaze hard up his leg and once again regretted how long he'd been stationary.

Kinch watched the colonel's face pale then said, "How far to the rendezvous?"

"Not far. Half a mile. Come on." Carter and Kinch both got under the colonel's arms, supporting him and dutifully ignoring the sounds of pain emanating from his tightly clenched lips.

A half mile later Kinch spotted the red checkered scarf hanging from a tree branch seconds before Carter had a misstep and Hogan's ankle swung against a fallen log that none of the three men had seen.

Hogan let out a cry that he couldn't stop and collapsed against Carter, falling away from the source of pain. The sudden weight plus the misstep tipped Carter into a briar bush and Hogan went in after him, his hands flying out and straight into the thorns.

Hogan did everything he could to keep his weight off the sergeant while fighting his way back out of the briars, their winter hardened barbs sharp as needles. By the time Kinch had extracted the colonel and Carter, both were covered in tiny bleeding punctures and scratches.

Hogan could barely feel them. His ankle had gone numb with pain at first, but now it was throbbing to beat the band, making remembering to breathe a struggle. He didn't hear Kinch anxiously asking if he was okay, nor did he hear Carter give a shout when Kinch's hurried extraction caused him yet more discomfort.

By the time the throbbing began to die Carter had seated himself in front of the colonel, gingerly plucking out thorns and cradling his right wrist.

"How'd you manage to get the branch wrapped around your wrist, Andrew?" Kinch was demanding, inspecting the cuts.

"The colonel was goin' down. I was just trying to keep him from squashin' me."

"Papa Bear?"

All three men jerked their heads up toward the sound of the soft feminine voice. The young woman who had asked the question was in her late teens. Her hair had been shoved under a leather cap, and she wore boy's clothing that didn't do much to hide her developing curves. At first Hogan thought, with some alarm, that she was armed. But the shining object tucked into her hands was a small pair of black theater glasses.

Hogan sucked oxygen into his lungs and fought against the pain and dizziness getting to his feet with Kinch's help. He couldn't put any weight on his leg anymore. Even holding it aloft hurt like the dickens. He was even more aware of the leaves, thorns and dirt that now covered his uniform, and the effect his appearance might have on a nervous underground contact.

Forgoing the usual exchange of phrases and forcing as much confidence as he could manage into his tone, Hogan asked. "You're Mozart?"

"I am. At least, I am now."

"What do you mean now?" Hogan asked, hopping forward a few feet with Kinch's help until he could lean against the solid trunk of a tree, his hand inches from the red scarf that marked the rendezvous point.

"Mozart was captured by Gestapo, two nights ago." The girl said, blue eyes filling quietly with tears. "He escaped and was shot."

"Dead?" Kinch asked, quietly.

The girl nodded, sniffled, then jutted her chin out proudly. "I am here to carry on his work."

"Are you sure the rest of your organization is safe? If you need out, now's the time to do it." Hogan said, trying to remember what he had been told about the late Mozart. The man hadn't been very old. Twenty-four or twenty-five. He couldn't have been this girl's father. Her brother perhaps? Boyfriend? She didn't look old enough to be married. She certainly didn't look old enough to be a representative of the underground.

But then there were soldiers under his command that weren't that much older than she was.

"We are. For now. We have moved our home base and-"

Kinch was fidgeting beside him and Hogan knew why even as he put a hand up to stall the explanation. "The less we know about each other, the better." We already know a little too much, he thought.

Dragging the dirt caked pack out of his jacket Hogan handed it over to the girl. "Those need to get through your organization and to Nesting Doll as quickly as possible. Don't spend a lot of time dreaming up schemes on how to get it out of Germany. Just get it to your next contact and pay attention."

The girl readily accepted the advice, hungrily waiting for more and Hogan winced, extremely hesitant to leave her to her own devices.

"Once these are out of your hands, you and your people should probably lay low for a while. Wait for us to contact you again. We'll do what we can to get you some supplies and support in the mean time."

Again the girl nodded, intently hanging on Hogan's every word. Nudging at the back of his mind was the constant reminder that he had left a mess behind him while trying to pull this caper. The sooner they got back the fewer explanations he would have to come up with, and the fewer miracles he would have to rely on. Yet it was clear that the new Mozart was inexperienced and terrified.

"Are you out here alone?"

The girl nodded again and Hogan wondered how much wider her eyes could get. Experimentally he put a little pressure on his ankle and almost blacked out at the rush of pain that greeted him. He'd done too much, too soon. Just getting back to camp was going to be a nightmare. A glance behind him told him that both of his men were ready, but Carter looked like a pin cushion. The bloody collection of scratches ripped into his wrist were likely to get infected if they weren't treated.

"How far are you from home?" Hogan finally asked, sighing.

This time the girl hesitated before answering and Hogan had to smile. She was learning. "It's alright. We're changing the plan a little." Hogan urged her.

"Three miles. Not that far." The girl said, gesturing over her shoulder.

"Three miles" sounded more like fifty, but Hogan nodded then said, "Hang on a minute."

Instinctively both of his men crowded closer as Hogan turned away from the contact.

"She doesn't know what she's doin'.." Carter said, even before Hogan could bring the topic up. The colonel nodded.

"It sounds like their group is younger and more inexperienced then we were led to believe. If we're going to get those plans through we may have to do it ourselves."

"Can you make three miles?" Kinch asked, carefully.

Hogan flashed him a glare, but he knew just as well as the staff sergeant, that he didn't have three miles in him.

Carter fidgeted beside him, his lips molding around words that he was stifling intentionally. Hogan gave him an expectant look and the young man asked, "What about Schultz?"

"That's the other problem." Hogan agreed nodding his head. It had been foolish to assume that this would be simple. Even more foolish of him to assume that injured or not he could carry it out. Given new developments, however, he was grateful he had. "Alright, the two of you need to get back to camp. If you can sneak in unnoticed, do it. Get things settled there, and see if you can't contact Newkirk and LeBeau at the hospital."

The orders were met with immediate and vehement disagreement but Hogan waited patiently until the protests died. "I'm not sending either one of you back on your own. We're in damage control mode right now, I'm relying on the two of you to keep the home fires burning until I can get back there."

"But Colonel, how do we cont-"

"In twelve hours try radio contact with Mozart. If I don't answer you can start putting Plan E into action."

Both of his men stiffened and exchanged glances at that but remained quiet. Hogan watched them, not liking that he'd had to say it, anymore than they liked hearing it.

"Get back to camp. Do what you can to keep Klink calm."

"Where do we say you are Colonel?"

Hogan thought about it a moment then took in a breath-


	3. Chapter 3

"That's ridiculous!" Klink bellowed, looking from the black sergeant to the white sergeant and back again, wondering just how much of their tripe he was expected to swallow. "How could a man with a bad ankle get so far away from a work detail that he got lost?"

Carter sent a panicky look toward the taller of the two and Kinch took in a breath, stuttering for a second before he happened on a response. "That was our concern too, Herr Kommandant. That's why we were gone so long."

"Right! We thought maybe something had happened to the colonel, and that was why he didn't make it back."

Carter lifted the mud stained, leaf coated crush cap with a slightly tragic look on his face and said. "Like we said, all we could find of him was his cap."

Klink glared at the piece of evidence, unable to deny that it could only have belonged to Hogan. The rambling story the prisoners had told him had included a dive into a briar bush and Carter's injuries were impossible to ignore. There were briars in the cap along with the mud and the leaves.

Klink thrust his arms behind his back and circled both men, noting the dirt on Sgt. Kinchloe's hands, the mud soaked into Sgt. Carter's trousers.

"And when you...couldn't find your colonel you returned to the road..." Klink repeated, catching the prisoners up to the point in their story where he had interrupted.

"That's right, sir." Carter said. "We were really surprised to see nobody on the road. A-and we were scared that we'd be stuck outside of camp all night so we high-tailed it here, sir."

"Uh huh..." Klink said, hovering in front of Carter for longer than was necessary before he shifted his focus to the imposing Kinchloe.

"We were hoping that you would send out a search party, Kommandant." Kinch put in helpfully, watching as Klink straightened and sidled behind his desk.

"Oh believe me, Sergeants, the search party has already been sent out. Dogs, guards with guns...they'll find your poor lost colonel and throw him back into the cooler where he can't ever get lost again!"

"Boy I sure hope that bull, Sergeant Schultz isn't out there too." Carter said.

As expected Klink's demeanor changed, the man drawing back from his attempt at playing the bully.

"Sergeant Schultz has been relieved of his duties." Klink said, the statement veiled of any discernible meaning.

Inwardly Kinch groaned, then offered a facetious, "He's not retirin' is he?"

The choice of words caused the kommandant to flinch a little, his face tightening around his lips. He seemed to consider for a moment then drew back even further into himself and said, "I suppose there is no reason to keep the information from you men. Sergeant Schultz has suffered a terrible heart attack. It's a miracle that he survived at all, and some of that may be due in part to the fast action of your fellow prisoners LeBeau and Newkirk."

The reactions Kinch and Carter showed weren't faked. The news came as a shock to them and they stood in breathless silence for a few minutes before Kinch asked, "Is he gonna make it?"

"The doctors don't know yet. He was in surgery the last I heard. Corporal Wilmutt is at the hospital with Newkirk and LeBeau now." Klink opened his mouth to say something else then changed his mind and finally sat down in his chair. "The poor man. I tried calling his wife, but their phone was confiscated years ago. She'll be informed by a soldier knocking on her door." Klink shook his head, unexpectedly sympathetic.

"He's still alive though, sir. Right?" Carter asked hopefully.

* * *

"He is still alive." The surgeon said, wearily removing the cloth cap that had been tied over his hair. "Your sergeant suffered from an aortic aneurysm. The sudden increase in blood pressure tore a hole in his aortic artery and he was bleeding into his chest cavity. When the prisoner fell on the sergeant in transit the shock of impact returned the sergeant's heart to rhythm. It caused more bleeding, but it also kept his brain alive until he arrived. Hopefully this reduced the risk of permanent damage."

The conversation was happening twenty-feet away, and half the words spoken in German were medical terminology that just hadn't come up in the spy business, but LeBeau and Newkirk were able to get the idea. Schultz was alive, barely.

"Damage?" Wilmutt asked, looking just as confused as the prisoners felt.

"There is much that we have learned recently about blood and its purpose in the body. We know that without blood circulating to the brain, the body can not survive. But if the body is revived and blood circulation is restored to the brain there is hope for recovery. However, the damage to Sgt. Schultz mind - his memory, his reflexes. They may be permanent. He may not even survive the surgery, but he has far better chances now than he had before."

The doctor stood, waiting for a response, and gradually coming to the understanding that the corporal before him was nothing more than a vague acquaintance of the man he'd spent a few hours working on. The two POWs in the corner, however, had been surreptitiously paying rapt attention to his every word from the moment he came out.

The doctor wasn't a fan of the military. Especially a military that apparently paid terrible attention to the health of its sergeants. But Hitler's regime had provided the health ministry with unexpected benefits, and he understood protocol. Pointing vaguely over the corporal's shoulder the doctor asked, "These prisoners are familiar with the guard?"

"Yah. I was assigned to the stalag only a week ago." Wilmutt admitted, still looking lost.

"May I speak to them?"

"Why would you want to?" Wilmutt asked.

Sighing the doctor considered his answer, then decided that he only wanted to have to say it once. "The sergeant is being moved to a recovery room. Once he is ready, please bring the prisoners there, Corporal..."

"Willmutt."

"Willmutt. I will contact your camp kommandant and tell him that you will be at the hospital with the prisoners overnight."

The doctor ignored the protest that followed him as he walked away, oblivious to the shocked looks that the two POWs exchanged.

Twenty minutes later he stood with the Englishman and the Frenchman just inside the room that Sergeant Hans Schultz had to himself. The big man was covered in bandages, surrounded by tubes and encased in an oxygen tent.

In quiet, accented English the doctor explained Schultz's condition again. "There is so much about the brain and how it works that we do not yet understand." The doctor interrupted himself with a smile as he said, "It is curious that we are unable to fathom the organ with which we attempt to fathom."

We know that the brain is active even when the patient is unconscious and studies have shown that familiar things...voices, music, the smells of favorite foods or perfumes, have an affect on the body, even when we are not aware that they are present. Medically there is not much more that I can do for this man. Were I to leave him alone in this room to recover, as my colleagues have suggested..." The doctor's voice took on a perturbed tone for a moment but he shrugged the argument away and said, "I am certain that this man would wither away. There is a psychological component to medicine that has too long been ignored."

The collegiate muckity-muck coming out of the doctor's mouth was beginning to annoy Peter. He didn't much like hospitals, and wasn't a fan of being in the same room with a man that might die, especially when he was partially to blame for it. He took in a breath and bit out, "Shouldn't you be havin' this conversation with the man's wife? His family?"

The doctor didn't seem surprised at all by the outburst. "We've tried contacting his family but they can not be reached by phone. His commanding officer has sent out a man to contact them in person but that will take several hours. The closest thing this man has to family...is you."

Both Newkirk and LeBeau snapped their gazes to the doctor, neither one of them looking happy about the revelation.

"What do you expect us to do?" LeBeau asked. "Sing him lullabies?"

"Yes." The doctor said with a pleased smile, despite his knowledge that the question had been facetious.

"What?"

"Sing to him. Tell him stories. Talk about the memories, pleasant ones, if there are any, that you and he might share."

"He's a kraut!" Louie shouted, unable to hold back the familiar anger that had been building inside him. He wasn't even sure who he was mad at. Schultz, himself, Hitler, Germany in general. It didn't matter. "Why should I do anything for him?"

"That's right. One less Kraut in the world and...and we've done our jobs as Allied soldiers." Newkirk put in, with almost too much conviction.

The doctor saw it in their faces. He could imagine what the men felt, but he also knew what they had done even before they could have known how much danger the "Kraut" was in.

"If that is the case, gentleman, why did you not let him die on the road?" The doctor asked, then quietly excused himself from the room. When the German corporal did not follow him he beckoned the soldier into the hall on the pretense of discussing the situation further.

As the door closed behind them Louie looked to his English brother-in-arms and jerked his beret from his head, tossing it onto one of the two wooden, straight back chairs sitting in the room. "That's a good question, Pierre." He said, his voice still heated. "Why _did_ we save his life?"

"Do you think if I knew that I'd still be standin' here?" Newkirk asked then paced along the wall as far from the mass of modern medicine as he could get. After he had covered the wall to wall distance twice he said, "I know why I did it. To give Hogan and them time to get away."

"Oui. Of course. To preserve the operation. To keep the mission going at all costs." LeBeau agreed, his arms crossed as he settled on the chair. Even as he spoke, the words felt like a lie, settling Biblically like gravel in his mouth.

Newkirk went back to pacing, hands on his hips as he glared angrily at the floor. He'd been reliving those first few minutes over and over again. Schultz's face going inhumanly still. The look of surprise and pain in his eyes before he began to fall. Then in the back of the truck. Bulging, unblinking eyes..

"He was dead." The Brit said quietly, moving to the narrow window that looked out over a courtyard.

LeBeau, lost in his own memories, didn't say anything, but his ears were closely attuned to the Englishman.

"Like a ruddy carp. I knew he was dead layin' in the back of that truck and it scared me to d-"

Louie's eyes glazed over, the scene playing in his mind. It had been a long time since he had seen that look on Newkirk's face. The look of wild, unfettered fear that had appeared in the back of the transport truck. Fear for the life of a man that was supposed to be their enemy.

"I was scared too." Louie finally admitted, just as quietly and he met Newkirk's gaze when the Englishman turned to face him. "He's the enemy, oui, but...he is no better or worse than we are."

As much as he hated to admit it, Newkirk knew the Frenchman was right.

"Besides, if he doesn't make it, we might as well pack up and go home." LeBeau hedged, raising a brow. Without Schultz cornered into turning a blind eye to their 'monkey business' their ongoing mission in the camp was going to fall apart. They had known that for sometime.

"I suppose, then, that it's our duty to make sure he survives this." Newkirk said, contemplative.

Without a word both POWs pulled chairs as close to the bed as the oxygen tent would allow to begin their vigil.


	4. Chapter 4

"How did you hurt your foot?"

"S'long story." Hogan offered, concentrating fully on the steps he was taking. The thick stick they'd found twenty minutes before was helping to support his weight, and he was doing everything in his power to keep from leaning on the poor girl walking with him, but it was getting harder with every step. His ankle was swelling over the top of his boot and throbbed regularly even when he was resting.

"We have a long walk ahead of us." The girl said, not bothering to hide the sarcasm in her voice. Hogan gave her an appraising side-long glance, once again finding himself unable to believe that she was only seventeen. She looked young, of course, but the more time he spent with her, the more she seemed like a woman of twenty-five.

"Alright. Let's call it a parachuting mishap."

"Parachute!? You mean you jumped out of a plane?"

"That's generally how it's done." Hogan quipped offering the girl a smirk when she grunted at him in dissatisfaction. "I'm sorry, Mozart. But there's a host of things I can't tell ya..for your own safety."

"Helen."

"That's your name?"

The girl was silent for a moment then said, "No...but it is a better name for me than Mozart."

The pair grew quiet as they navigated over a thick tree trunk lying over the path. The tree was thick enough that Hogan had to sit on the bark and rotate to get over it. Sitting down felt so good that once his feet were on the other side he stayed there, panting against the exertion of fighting the pain.

"It hurts alot?"

Hogan gave her a look through his eyelashes then gritted his teeth, pulling his foot up and resting it on the tree trunk. The simple act of elevating the foot almost immediately reduced the strength of the throbbing. "It's broken, so yes...it hurts alot."

"Broken!" The girl exclaimed with undisguised disapproval. "Are you crazy!? Who goes out to meet someone in the middle of the woods with a broken foot!?"

"Broken ankle. I do. And quiet down. We may not be the only people in the woods." Hogan said, gentling his tone as best he could despite the irritation that inevitably came with being injured. "I didn't have a choice. We knew that your organization was just starting. We don't often meet new underground groups face to face so soon, but establishing connections with Nesting Doll has been a priority. I had to come out personally just in case something exactly like this happened."

"In case you fell out of a plane and broke your ankle?" Helen asked, clearly confused. Her command of English was excellent, but Hogan realized that he had lost her somewhere along the way.

"In case the twenty-something guy named Mozart that I was expecting, turned out to be a seventeen-year-old girl named Helen."

The comment brought an end to the playful light in Helen's eyes and she grew sullen remembering why she was there in the first place.

"I'm sorry.." The American apologized immediately.

"No...no, you did nothing wrong. He was my brother. He is dead now, so it can't hurt to tell you, his name was Paul. He was very smart and very strong." Tears were bubbling in her eyes but Helen didn't seem the type to burst into wails, and after a moment or two of sniffling the tears dried. "He had a wife and two children. Daughters. They live with me...with us...now."

"That must be hard."

As Hogan carefully moved his foot back toward the ground he caught the slight shrug of Helen's shoulders but she said nothing.

Together they stood and Hogan braced himself for the slice of pain, pushing past it and forcing himself onward.

* * *

"I wonder what Hogan's gonna say when he gets back to camp." Newkirk muttered, breaking the brief silence.

"Oui...if he makes it back. The plan was that we would cover for them until they got back to the road. The other guards probably took the prisoners back to camp the minute we left. Colonel Hogan and the others are out there on foot." LeBeau said, pacing absently at the foot of the bed. "And as long as he's conscious he would never let Carter or Kinch try to carry him back."

"Wish he'd'a let me go. Bleedin' officers. Stubborn, ruddy block-headed fools..." Newkirk picked absently at a loose thread on his cap, then tossed, "Isn't that right, Schultzie?" toward the man in the bed. "We'd all be better off without 'em."

LeBeau gave a reproachful chortle and shook his head. "You better watch it, Pierre. By the time this war is over you may be an officer yourself."

Pursing his lips, Newkirk gave the Frenchman a mildly bewildered look and asked, "What are you talkin' about?"

"Oh come on! All the dangerous missions that we've pulled off. All the crazy schemes. All the captured POWs that we've liberated. To the generals we say, 'give us more pay'. But that isn't the way of the military. No, they promote you so that they can retire you. It's all economics."

Newkirk chuckled and shook his head. "You're gettin' philosophical in your old age, Louie."

A string of unamused French greeted the remark and Newkirk smirked triumphantly. "Not to mention that you'll be demoted to master dish-washer if you keep talkin' about top secret information in front of the enemy."

LeBeau followed Newkirk's pointed finger and drew a little closer to the plastic confines of the oxygen tent. "Hey Schultzie, do you solemnly swear never to breathe a word about this to anyone, so help you strudel?"

"YahVol!" Newkirk grunted in a fare immitation of the German.

"Nothing to worry about. He's sworn to it on strudel." Louie grinned a little then grew silent, watching the pale face through the plastic. He'd never noticed the gray spots on Schultz's face. Age marks, that disappeared when the man was smiling. Now, against the ashen palor of his skin, the spots looked like deep shadows. It was a color combination that did not belong in nature. For some reason he was instantly reminded of something that happened when he was very young.

Newkirk watched his mate disappear from the here and now for a few minutes then quietly asked, "And where were you just now?"

Louie stepped away from the bed and went to sit next to the Englander. "Where were _you_ in 1908?"

"I believe I was a cinder in me mum's eye. I wasn't born yet, mate."

LeBeau smirked, crossing his arms, surprised as always to be reminded of how much older he was than Newkirk. "The world mourned the dearth of you, I'm sure."

"Jolly joker..." Newkirk chuckled without thinking, and both men silently glanced to the man in the bed before LeBeau continued.

"I was seven years old then. We were living in Paris, in a boarding house that a rich woman had built. We weren't very close to the Eiffel Tower..you know, the rich part of Paris, but we could see it from the roof any time we liked. Anyway...there was a big race that year. An automobile race from New York to Paris. It was such a romantic, adventurous and fantastic idea..it occupied the mind of every little boy and girl that I knew. We would constantly have make believe races up and down the alleys. And because it was a race around the world we would encounter kangaroos in Australia, or cowboys and Indians in the American West, polar bears at the North Pole. And of course it was nothing at all to cross the ocean with a boat. Our cars could float across!" LeBeau was grinning at the memory, Newkirk along with him.

"We followed that race religiously, stealing newspapers so that we could clip out the articles and paste them into books. All of us picked out our heroes. The drivers that we were routing for. Of course all of us cared the most about the French drivers but, we also picked others. The best part was that we knew _we_ would be the boys and girls who would be there to greet the winner. Not the Americans, or the Germans, or any other people in all the world...because all of those fantastic machines and all of those drivers were coming to Paris. We felt like kings, to know that the whole world was gradually turning its eye toward us."

"Who won?"

LeBeau shrugged and tossed a hand, "An American. I can't even remember his name, but the car was a Thomas Flyer. A great white monstrosity with yellow trim wheels. Piled high with luggage and warm weather gear and everything the driver's would need. It wasn't the first automobile I had seen, but it was the brightest one."

Newkirk chuckled beside him and LeBeau shrugged. "It baffled all the adults. Who would have the gall to paint a machine white!? Especially a machine that was supposed to cross deserts and climb mountains and ford rivers. When the car arrived it was so banged up and dirty, even after they washed it. The fact that the car was white was all that my mother and father could talk about the whole day."

"An American, eh? Sounds like them."

* * *

The house loomed out of the blinding light of an early sunset looking no less glorious than the pearly gates. Hogan was about ready to cut his own foot off by the time he eased down into a kitchen chair, allowing Helen to help him elevate his leg on a second chair. His ankle felt like cracked China and he guarded the limb ferociously after he became the focus of a buzz of attention inside the small home.

The woman who had welcomed them into the home was introduced by Helen as Charlotte, the two young girls playing with plain, unpainted wooden blocks and rag dolls on the floor were "Lily and Heina."

The man of the house was well into his sixties and walked with difficulty, using counters, tables and chairs to maintain his balance along with a cane. He lurched into the room, dragging one leg with every step, but his brown eyes were intelligent and piercing and seemed to understand the situation with a single glance.

"This is my father," Helen, explained, guiding the older man with practiced ease to a chair that she had set directly next to Hogan's wounded ankle. "He is a doctor."

The whiskered older man gave him a wane, toothy smile then turned to his work, leaning over Hogan's leg and immediately prompting a stifled curse from the man as he prodded the swollen appendage. "Broken?" The doctor asked, then looked to his daughter when Hogan didn't respond right away.

"Yah, father."

"Two days ago." Hogan managed through gritted teeth before he braced himself with a white knuckled grip on the seat of the chair he'd plopped down in. The doctor began the process of removing his boot, using remarkable care that seemed at odds with his mobility issues. The pain was unbearable, and the first shout of agony that Hogan couldn't silence prompted the doctor to stop what he was doing.

"Kleine, schnappes bitte." The doctor said softly, and Helen nodded, leaving the room.

"Kleine?" Hogan asked, taking deep breaths to combat the spinning of the room.

"It means 'baby', in your English. She is the youngest." The doctor said neither overly friendly, nor hostile to the stranger.

Hogan closed his eyes, working on settling his stomach so that he could ingest the alcohol that was undoubtedly meant for him. When it arrived in a glass instead of a bottle he gulped it down, breathing through the burn. He was already sweating from the exertion of the walk, but the flush of blood to his face made him feel like he'd stepped into a sauna and he took another minute to acclimate, removing his bomber jacket.

As soon as the coat was free of his shoulders every person in the room heard the smack of the packet of secrets dropping to the floor. Hogan had forgotten that it was still tucked into his zipped jacket. Quietly Helen picked up the package and disappeared into another room with it.

The doctor began again without much warning, finally pulling the boot free of Hogan's foot and eyeing the tight bandaging job that had been Hogan's only allowance of medical assistance. Wilson had been unhappy. Hogan had been adamant.

"It has been set?" The doctor asked and Hogan nodded, his face still tightly fixed with pain. "We must undo the bandage, allow the swelling to go down, then tie them again." The man informed him, already beginning the task even as he explained it.

Hogan was so closely focused on the doc's every move that he didn't even notice the miniature presence at his elbow until something soft and made of cloth was pressed against his hand. When he looked down he watched as a rag doll repeatedly smacked its head against his hand, controlled by the motions of the youngest of the two children. Hogan barely remembered that the girl's name was Heina.

A moment later he realized that Heina wasn't hitting him with the doll, but that the doll was kissing his hand. The tiny squeaking noises were coming from the little girl's lips, and the doll's head was aimed strategically at the myriad of thorn marks on the back of his hand.

"Danke, Fraulein." Hogan managed and reached his fingers out to shake the dolls hand. Heina greeted him with bright blue eyes and a brilliant grin, and giggled before gathering her doll and running out of the room.

The first smile Hogan had seen on the man's face appeared as the patron of the house watched his granddaughter leave. "She is smart, Heina. She will be a doctor some day, too." The smile fell a little as the doctor focused on the bruising pattern that marbled Hogan's ankle, but the colonel knew enough to understand that it wasn't his injury upsetting the doctor.

"Paul was your son?"

"Yes." The man said simply. "I wanted him to be a doctor too. But..." The man shrugged and turned his attention to Helen who had reentered the room with a pot of water. The doctor reached in without hesitation and pulled a soaked cloth from the basin, wringing it out then folding it into a precise rectangle. He wrapped the ice cold compress around the wounded appendage, applying two more cloths before he sat back to look over his work.

"We will let those take care of some of the swelling, then put your foot into a cast."

"Wait a minute...a cast, how long is that going to take?"


	5. Chapter 5

"Five bleedin' hours." Newkirk muttered, staring through the window in the door to the clock on the wall in the hallway before he shook his head and paced back into the room.

LeBeau watched him from the seat in which he had been dozing and yawned stretching to his full length, which wasn't much. "How far do you think we would get if we casually headed for the Hofbrau?"

"Dressed like this..not far." Newkirk said, glancing down at his sweat and dust stained uniform. It was dark outside the hospital room. The night still coming faster than the day. "But if we stole somethin' from the doctor's lounge..." The Englander left the thought dangling where it was and grew silent.

They'd been all but ignored in the small hospital room, as had the man in the bed. His condition hadn't changed and he had recquired little in the way of care. The nurses had popped in two times, but said nothing to the two POWs. What bothered the Englander most was that they'd seen and heard nothing of the doctor since he'd left them in the room. The only reason Newkirk hadn't already walked out of the hospital was because he had caught a glimpse of Corporal Wilmutt standing just outside the door.

"If it were Schultz gaurdin' us instead of Mutty, he'd be treatin' us to beers at gunpoint." Newkirk muttered, then turned to face the ever darkening room, leaning back against the window sill.

"True. Schultz loves his beer. And his strudel. And his "potato pancakes"." Louie did his own impression of the jovial eater. "I don't think I've ever met a German more enthusiastic about the dullest of foods."

"He'd eat anythin'. Tried to eat a bar o' soap once."

"What!?"

Newkirk smirked, his hands in his pockets, staring at the toe of his boot as he thought back. "Shortly after I started gettin' Red Cross packages...you remember they were delayed at first..." Louie nodded, already smiling and Newkirk continued. "After I'd hid the cigarettes and the candy bars, and traded everythin' else, all I had left was a bar of soap. One particular afternoon, I had nothin' to do. I started carvin' into that bar and by the time I was done it looked just like a bit of amber sweet. I hadn't been up to anything intentional but I had a few debts and so I made a bet with some of the jokers in Barrack 4 that I could get one of the guards to eat that piece of soap."

Newkirk stopped, leaning back, his eyes dancing at the memory. "Oh the money I had ridin' against me. But somehow I knew I was gonna win this bet. One rainy afternoon along came Schultz. I told him all about this fantastic new bit of candy that I'd got in me red cross package and I offered to share a piece with him.

"It tastes funny, though." I told him. "It's like your first taste of wine. It takes a true connoisseur of candy to appreciate this sweet." Schultz was all about it. Convinced that he had the expert taste required to truly appreciate what I was hesitating to give him."

Newkirk started to laugh, choking on the memory, then tried to sober. "I took it out, wrapped nice and neat in a bit of brown paper. I'd written some bullocks on it to make it look fancy. He unwrapped it, sniffed at the paper bouncing his eyebrows the way he does. "Oh this is _gut_. I can tell already." He said, then popped it into his mouth."

"For shame, Pierre!" LeBeau admonished, but he was grinning. "How long did it take for him to spit it out?"

"Seconds." Newkirk said, grinning broadly. "He'd tasted soap before, the dirty rascal."

"You won your bet?"

"Of course! And.." Newkirk put up a forestalling hand, "To keep things friendly between us, because who wants to be shot for tricking a guard into eating soap, I shared my winnings with the sod. When he realized the profits he could make he offered to eat soap for me anytime I asked."

As the laughter dwindled between them Newkirk stepped closer to the oxygen tent than he'd been all day, crossing his arms protectively in front of his chest, and leaning in to study the unconscious man. "Hard to believe somebody so full of life could be pulled away so quickly."

"He is not dead yet, mon ami." Louie said, quietly.

Peter felt what might have been emotion starting to overwhelm him. It might have been a cold too. He would sooner have blamed it on a cold than admit that he had feelings of friendship towards the enemy. Wiping at his nose, Newkirk quickly stepped away from the bed and said, "Good thing too, he owes me money."

Louie watched Newkirk's face closely, catching the sudden congestion in his voice, and the moisture in his eyes. He smiled gently, knowing his British friend's ways inside and out, and decided to say nothing, giving Pierre his space. "He'll make it." Louie said, firmly hoping that it would be true.

* * *

When Hogan woke it was well after dark and his foot felt like it had been stuffed into a gun barrel. He was laying on something soft, covered in a rough blanket and alone in a dark room. A not very big room, he found when he moved his arms out from under the blanket and smacked his knuckles against a thin, wooden wall.

To his right there was a wall, and two feet beyond the edge of the bed to his left was another wall. A closet, a hidden room perhaps? It made sense that his genial host would place an unexpected patient in a safe room, just in case. Hogan couldn't escape the feeling that he had been secreted away in a coffin, however, and worked his way slowly to an up right position. Grateful that the air above his head was clear of obstruction.

He listened for a few minutes, disoriented in the darkness. There were no voices, no way of knowing how long he'd slept, or who might be waiting outside the door, assuming he could find one. He moved his foot from the surface of the bed, the tightness and additional weight telling him that the doctor might have succeeded in casting his ankle.

Hogan wasn't too happy about it, but he didn't have a choice. The proximity of the walls made it easier to stand, and the dull pounding in his ankle, distant as it was, told him that he'd been dosed with some kind of painkiller. He stood three feet from the end of the bed, feeling around the wall in front of him until he found a crack that ran ceiling to floor. He pushed, pulled, then slid the panel to the left and finally got it open.

The room beyond was dark as well, but light filtered under the edge of a door. The room he'd slept in had to have been hidden behind the pantry. Hogan moved as quietly as he could, wincing when his wounded ankle encountered canning jars and tins. He could only hope that unwanted visitors would assume he was a rat. A very large, graceless rat.

Standing at the thin pantry door Hogan listened for voices, sensing the greater heat of the room beyond and shivering. Before he could open the door himself he heard a metallic rattle near his right shoulder and flinched away from the bright light as Helen jerked the door open.

"You're awake!" She said, breathing heavily. The look she gave him was a guilty one, and she seemed perturbed at being distracted from whatever she had been doing before. As his eyes adjusted Hogan scanned the room beyond the girl's shoulder, then stepped past her. She didn't put too much effort into getting out of his way, and stayed clinging to the door once he was free of the pantry.

Her behavior spiked adrenaline through his system, warning him that something was off. "Who's here?" he asked, limping down the length of the counter until he could see into the room beyond the kitchen. There was a low fire burning in the fireplace, a rumpled blanket and pile of pillows on the floor beside the fire and a pair of cups sitting on the hearth.

"Nobody is here." Helen said, belatedly. "Father and Charlotte took the girls into town. Back to her home."

"You said that your sister-in-law lived with you." Hogan corrected her, then turned back to the kitchen, hopping to the outer door and glancing through the small window it afforded. The moonlight reflected off the bare skin of a half-unclothed male streaking across the open yard and disappearing into the woods. With a frown, Hogan relaxed a little, turning a disapproving glance toward the teen girl.

"Boyfriend?"

Helen jutted her jaw out and pursed her lips, saying nothing in response.

"Listen, kid. I don't care what you do on your own time. Just don't lie to me when there are lives hanging in the balance. Especially mine."

Helen looked away, shrugging one shoulder, still clinging to the door. Only now she had developed a peculiar blush to her cheeks, and a moment later Hogan realized that she was crying.

This time he was positive it couldn't have been anything he had said, but he took a careful step toward her. The girl turned from him, wiping at her cheeks before stomping into the dark main room where she busily cleaned up the evidence of her clandestine evening.

Hogan sighed and leaned against the counter, finally getting a good look at the cloth wrapped splint, and not a cast after all, that the doctor had crafted around his still swollen ankle. Thankfully the doctor had been kind enough to leave his pants intact, merely shoving the cuff up.

"Where is your father, Helen?"

"I told you. He went with Charlotte to their home. She needed some things." Helen said petulantly, carrying the two cups into the kitchen and setting them down forcefully in the basin that they used for a sink.

The thing that had been nagging at the back of his mind suddenly came to the forefront and Hogan scanned the room rapidly before he asked, "That package of information. What happened to it?"

"Father took it with him. To meet the contact." Helen said, blinking at the unexpected fervor in the American's tone.

"With your sister and the little girls!?" Hogan demanded, spotting his jacket on the back of one of the kitchen chairs and jerking it on.

"He was going to meet the contact alone, after he dropped them off." Helen explained. "There is no danger...Paul met with them all the time. They are _gut_ people."

"If they are such _gut_ people how did the Gestapo happen across your brother, just in time to capture him and then shoot him dead?" Hogan demanded, searching under the tables and chairs for his boot. He wasn't going to be able to get it on over the splint, but he wasn't going to leave an American made military boot in their home either.

Helen didn't have a response for that, her face tightening in a rush of emotion.

"For that matter, how do you know you can you trust that boy you were with tonight?" Hogan demanded, the outraged commanding officer tone overtaking the rush of compassion at the sight of the girl now weeping in front of him. "Suppose he found out that an American was hiding out in your house, and went to tell his parents. Your family would be arrested within hours and this whole operation would go down the tubes."

Angrilly Helen spat, "He has no parents. They were killed while traveling. A bombing raid. American bombers."


	6. Chapter 6

Hogan's response was cut off by the unexpected viciousness in the girl's tone. For a moment there was nothing he could say and Helen filled in the gap, leaning forward.

"But why should you care? Your life hasn't been ruined by people bombing your home and your school. You haven't had everything change...you haven't had to give up love because of stupid men with stupid ideas."

"Helen-" This wasn't a twenty-something woman, Hogan thought, but a teenager with remarkable acting skills. It hadn't been maturity he had seen earlier in the girl, it was confidence in her ability to pull the wool over the eyes of the world. Hogan didn't have much patience for teenagers, as a rule, even less in war time.

"He is all alone. He has nobody to look after him, and nobody to love him. He was going to join the German army but he couldn't, and it devastated him."

"Helen..." Hogan could hear the girl justifying herself, but she hadn't yet given him a reason to need to. The gap in the information was making his stomach turn, and a part of him wanted to shut her up quickly before she said too much.

"You are such a big, brave hero. How many people have you loved? How many people have you loved that have been bombed by the enemy that you are trying to help? Do you think about the boys and girls that your bombs kill? What about the mothers, and fathers?"

Hogan thought about the men in his operation, some of whom he had lost. He thought about the people in England, Poland, France, Belgium and every other country that Germany had been working to crush for the past decade. He thought about Schultz, reminded suddenly that the man had been hospitalized and he knew nothing about his condition, or how it came about.

He also thought about the fact that he was arguing with a hormonal teenager, trying to be an adult well before she was ready. Her world of black and white, and right and wrong, was only beginning to convolute into a mesh of gray. But it wasn't his job to set her straight. And a part of him wanted to preserve what little innocence and hope might remain in the girl's world.

He kept his mouth shut and looked away from the glimmer of triumph in her eyes, refocusing on the situation at hand. As far as the package of information was concerned he could probably assume that the doctor had managed to get it safely to the next contact down the line.

He'd completed the mission, he realized, and should be worrying about getting back to camp as quickly as possible. That meant he needed to find his boot. Hogan pushed away from the counter and used the closely packed furniture to navigate the perimeter of the room once before a second realization hit him.

His boot was gone...maybe tucked out of sight in the room that he'd been sleeping in, but his jacket had been on the back of the chair, plain as day.

"Why was my coat out here?" Hogan asked carefully, looking at Helen. The girl didn't respond right away, her eyes darting about, and her look once more sliding towards guilt.

"I was...I..." She couldn't come up with a lie fast enough and from the look on her face Hogan could tell that her purpose had been juvenile at best.

"I gotta get outta here." Hogan said, then limped back into the pantry, the hidden room beyond barely illuminated by the light filtering from the kitchen. He had just located his boot and scanned the room once to make sure there was no other evidence laying about, when the pantry door closed and he again heard the rattle of the simple metal latch.

"Hey!" He shouted, rushing to the door and pounding on it. The door quivered violently, but the latch held. Still, it wouldn't take much to break the door open, he realized, at about the same time that Helen did. He heard the groan of the kitchen table being shoved across the floor, then the impact of the heavy piece of furniture against the pantry door. "Helen!"

"I don't have a choice." The girl wailed. "I'm sorry! I don't have a choice!"

* * *

It was midnight when the doctor finally came in to check on Schultz. LeBeau was asleep on the two chairs, though his rest had been fitful at best. Perched on the window sill, Newkirk had been nodding off himself, but like LeBeau he wasn't at peace. They were hungry, sore from the rough ride in the truck and the total lack of accommodation.

"Come to check on your experiment?" Newkirk asked the doctor, once more sticking to English.

The accusation hung in the air for a moment as the surgeon straightened his spine, then turned to consider the Englishman. "It bothers you, ja? The sergeant's treatment?"

"What bothers me is the way _we've_ been treated. Prisoners of War are to be held in prison camps, not hospital rooms, and not without food or water for twelve hours!"

The doctor registered mild surprise then blithely responded, "The man guarding you should have seen to your comforts. He took his own meal several hours ago."

"Course he did." Newkirk said, "He wasn't expected to be the master of ceremonies was he?"

"You don't wish to participate in this man's recovery?"

"No. I bloody well don't. I said it when we first walked in 'ere, didn't I? He's the enemy. Why should I care if he lives or dies?"

"Yet, you do." The doctor countered quickly.

"You must be deaf." Newkirk sneered.

"Please, Corporal, mind your tone. We mustn't poison the environment with petty squabbles."

Anger flared fast and hard in his breast and Newkirk pushed away from the window, marching over to the Frenchman and shaking him to wakefulness. "Louie, we're leavin'. I'm tired of playin' Igor to his Dr. Frankenstein."

As LeBeau groggily got to his feet Newkirk pushed his way through the door. He ignored Wilmutt's startled shout and slapped his cap on his head as he marched down the hall to the stairs that would take him to the main floor. Before he could get there a vaguely familiar figure rounded the corner, her face solemn and pale. She took up plenty of room, and her face was set in its usual stern grimace, but she was clearly in emotional pain.

When her eyes settled on the British RAF uniform, then the Frenchman's uniform, the colors and styles were foreign to her. Her worry and fear turned to hatred and she wheeled on the Stalag 13 guard that had brought her to the hospital.

"Those evil men. They are the reason my Hansy is here. They did this to him. With their schemes and their trouble. They should be shot!" Her accusations built from there, disturbing the quiet of the hospital and rousing a handful of nurses and orderlies.

The doctor moved in to try to calm the woman, but the moment he suggested that the POWs were necessary for the patient's recovery, Mrs. Schultz railed against him, screaming for the arrest of Newkirk and LeBeau.

The guard that had brought Mrs. Schultz did what he could to calm the woman by hustling the Englander and the Frenchman out of the hospital. They were led at gun point to the staff car and forced into the back. When Newkirk bristled at the rough treatment the panicked guard slammed the butt of his gun into the Brit's solar plexus, then threatened to do the same to the Frenchman.

Louie put up his hands in surrender and placated the guard with promises of compliance, helped Newkirk to his feet and sat with the man silently all the way back to the camp.

"It's just as bloody well..." Newkirk muttered in response to the quizzical look LeBeau was giving him, rubbing at his belly as they stepped gingerly from the car in the camp yard.

LeBeau didn't say anything in response, marching without need for direction to the door of Barrack 2. The lights were off, and the room quiet when they entered, but it was clear that most of the men were still awake.

Kinch didn't even sound groggy when he asked, "What happened?"

The Frenchman sent a side long glance to Newkirk who, with a groan, climbed into his bed fully clothed. "We were kicked out of the hospital. Mrs. Schultz arrived and objected to our presence there."

"Why did they keep ya there so long?"

"Because Schultz is bein' treated by bloody Dr. Frankenstein. No offense to your curiosity but it's been a long day of nursin' fat sergeants, do you mind if we save this fascinatin' conversation for later?"

Kinch gave Newkirk an irritated look that the Brit couldn't have seen in the dark anyway, then blinked in surprise as LeBeau moved to the colonel's quarters and knocked lightly on the door.

"He isn't there, Louie." Kinch said softly.

"Oh." Louie said with a shrug, then moved toward the bunk that provided access to the tunnels. He was stopped halfway across the room when Kinch said. "He didn't come back with us."

Both Newkirk and LeBeau sent hushed demands for explanations into the darkness and Kinch sat up on his bunk. "The colonel heard the truck engine start up from the woods, and sent Carter back to check it out. He hung around long enough to get a good idea of what was going on. When the meeting with the underground contact got complicated he sent Carter and me back to camp to cover."

"Complicated? It was a simple meeting, what could have gone wrong?" LeBeau demanded over top of Newkirk's, "You left him out there with a bloody broken ankle on his own!?"

"We didn't have a choice. You know how stubborn he is, Newkirk, and he had a point. The contact that met us wasn't Mozart. It was his sister. Mozart is dead. The girl said he was shot while escaping the Gestapo."

"That's the _ninth_ new underground agent in as many weeks!" Newkirk said from his bunk and Kinch found himself agreeing. "We have to go back out after him."

"I was thinkin the same thing but we couldn't go anywhere until we knew what was going on with the two of you."

"Well we're back and not likely to be playin' Florence Nightingale anytime soon, let's get crackin'." The minute Newkirk's boots hit the floor the door burst open and the lights were snapped on.

The same guard that had retrieved he and LeBeau from the hospital pointed a gloved finger at Newkirk and the Frenchman and said, "You, and you, come with me."

The command was met with a chorus of complaints and refusals, but this guard wasn't Schultz. He pointed his gun and cocked it, the simple sound bringing absolute silence to the room in seconds. "The commandant wishes for you to make a report." The guard said firmly.

Newkirk met Kinch's intense gaze and felt the man's voice in his head demanding that he cool down and do what he was told. Newkirk bit down hard on the inside of his cheek and grabbed his cap from the top of his bed, cramming it on his head.

"Don't have to get nasty about it." He grumbled as he passed the guard, marching back out into the compound. LeBeau followed, giving Kinch what he hoped was a reassuring promise that he would keep Newkirk in line to the best of his ability.

As soon as the guard was gone Kinch went back to the trick bunk and opened it. As he stepped into the hollow shaft he said, "Carter, keep an eye on the door." then descended into the tunnels intent on finding out how much progress Baker had made on the radio.

* * *

Hogan estimated that he'd been alone for about twenty minutes.

His first task had been to remove the splint, painfully force his ankle back into the boot and re-tie the supports around the throbbing appendage. Then he'd bruised both shoulders, throwing all his weight against the door to no great success. He'd found a tin and tried using it as a hammer, focusing the power behind his blows in an attempt to break the wood of the door. It had begun to splinter and give at about the same time that the back door opened and the kitchen once again filled with voices.

Hogan briefly entertained the hope that this was only the doctor and his daughter-in-law returning home. But the voices were younger, all masculine, and full of false bravado. In the few minutes he had left, Hogan shoved two of the heavier tins into his pocket, then dropped one of the canning jars. He was picking at the glass in the darkness, rushed by the sound of the table being dragged back, when the door was jerked open. Hogan thrust to his feet and backed all the way into the shadow, wanting a good look at his aggressor before he tried an assault.

He didn't expect that he would be facing a kid in a costume.


	7. Chapter 7

The bulky, teenage boy standing in the doorway was armed with a shotgun. He wore a uniform, that might have been meant to represent the SS but it was nothing more than an elaborate Halloween costume. The stitching was rough, the dye job fading, the insignia looked like a child had drawn it on. In the dark he might have looked like a soldier but in the warm light of the kitchen he looked like a Gestapo rag-doll.

The boy shouted for him to come out with his hands up and Hogan obliged, glancing down at the boy's dirt stained riding boots. Beyond him the room was crowded with three other boys, some looked younger, some older. None of them had the confidence or size of the first boy. All of them had their own handmade SS uniforms on, and were armed with hunting rifles or clubs.

Boys playing soldier. Yet Hogan was certain that the guns were loaded.

He wasn't surprised to see Helen lurking in the doorway, refusing to meet his gaze.

The lead boy shouted for Hogan to stand still and pressed the barrels of the shot gun between his shoulder blades in emphasis. A moment later the American felt the boy's hands exploring the pockets of his jacket. The junior 'SS'-man was confused by the tin cans, and tossed them onto the table before patting at the colonel's pants.

"I told you he was unarmed." Helen said quietly from the doorway, still refusing to look at Hogan.

"Sit down, in the chair." The boy ordered in his native tongue. Hogan ignored him, pretending he didn't understand. Frustrated the boy tried again, stepping back so that he could point the long barrel of the gun. Hogan stared at him and waited, wondering just how far this charade was going to go.

When the frustrated teenager began to raise his rifle, butt first, Helen spoke up again. "He does not speak German."

Hogan hid his surprise. Helen had to have brought the group to the house, yet she was protecting him. "He wants you to sit down. In that chair." Helen translated.

If he'd been standing on two solid and healthy legs Hogan might have refused, fought the boy for the gun and made a run for it. But the past thirty minutes had heralded a slow return of the throbbing in his ankle. The pain killers were wearing off. And he had a sneaking suspicion that these boys were trigger happy.

He quietly sat in one of the straight back chairs, and tried not to stiffen when the leader ordered two of his underlings to tie the prisoner to the chair. The two that responded to the command were called Kiln and Franks, and they did their duty with an air of militaristic self-importance.

Hogan withstood the crude binding, flexing the muscles on his arms to give himself a little room. His arms were tied separately to the back of the chair, his legs to the front legs of the chair. He'd pulled his pant leg down over the splint and had done his best not to react every time Kiln jerked the rope tight.

It was as if the final props had been set for a spaghetti-western interrogation scene, the lead boy circling the chair and sneering in intimidation. Hogan rolled his eyes and waited for the questioning to begin.

* * *

"I would like to know why you were in Hammelburg for so long?" Klink demanded.

Newkirk, refusing to come to attention despite the order that the guard had given, kept his arms crossed over his chest and heatedly said, "Maybe you should ask Corporal Mutty about that. Or better still drag the bleedin' sawbones in here. It was his idea."

"Corporal LeBeau, is this true?"

Surprised to even be included, Louie sent another warning glare toward the irritated Brit then said, "Oui, Herr Kommandant. Corporal Wilmutt was told by the doctor that we should stay in the room to help with Schultz's recovery. The doctor didn't really tell us why he needed us there. When Madame Schultz arrived at the hospital she became upset at our presence and the guard brought us back to camp."

Klink circled both men, analyzing the explanation for the usual tomfoolery. He stretched the men's words for signs of falsehood, of Hogan's touch present in the lies, and to his surprise found that there were none.

Further, when he tried to marry the explanation to his preconceived idea that Schultz's illness had somehow been part of an escape plot, his face fell in anticlimactic defeat. He didn't like being wrong, and he especially didn't like that he was wrong and the Englander was still standing in disrespectful defiance before him. With a sneer Klink, said, "I don't believe you. Corporal, put them in the cooler, and give them time to think about their lies."

* * *

The first English word this kid had to have learned was "lying". He liked that word. He'd used it first when Helen translated that Joseph, the leader, wanted to know the American's code name. When Hogan said nothing, the boy slammed his rifle butt down hard against Hogan's thigh, creating a stinging bruise but not doing any permanent damage.

What followed was a whirlwind of identities, none of which Joseph seemed content with. Each answer was followed by "You are lying!" in English, and another bruise on his thighs.

When the effort of beating his prisoner left the youth breathless, Hogan tried to warn the kid about the danger of slamming the butt of a rifle like that but Joseph wasn't interested. He paced and paraded in front of his buddies, playing up the part. It was a bad World War I spy movie with a pretty boy, soap opera actor in the role of head interrogator. The boy was power crazy and doing his best to impress his audience.

At the same time, Hogan was realizing that one of them had a few ounces of intelligence. The way he was tied to the chair hadn't been that uncomfortable at the start, but as the bruises developed on his thighs he began to wish desperately that he could stretch his legs out and relieve the pressure of the blood collecting under the skin. The ropes binding his ankles prevented that. Every blow caused him to flinch and that tugged the rope ever tighter around his swollen ankle, making it throb all the more.

Joseph approached him again, this time with another tactic. He pointed at the gold inscribed letters on Hogan's jacket and said in German, "We already know who you are. We've spoken to our own contacts and we know about you and your family. We can get to them. We have many contacts. You should tell us what we want to know or your wife and children will suffer."

Hogan was beginning to recognize the lines. He was certain that he'd seen this movie before. A smile was edging the corner of his mouth and he shook his head as Helen translated, trying to come up with the movie title. "You like watching movies don't you?" Hogan asked, then looked to Helen.

Joseph gave a confused look to the girl, listened, then whirled on Hogan and slammed the gun butt into the American's stomach.

Hogan tried to curl around the area of impact, but couldn't. His breath was gone and the hit had produced a little bile in the back of throat, which he did his best to swallow. The single strike was followed by a flurry of blows to his thighs and stomach that were short lived but brutal.

The attack ended abruptly when the gun went off, the barrels pointed at Kiln when they exploded.

There is only so much abuse that a shot gun shell can take in the chamber before it reacts to an impact against the percussion cap, and both shells had apparently reached their limit. What had been Kiln's head and shoulders turned into a spray of red.

Some of the pellets slammed into the boy standing beside Kiln, but the rest drove bits of Kiln's flesh and bone into the wall. Helen screamed in horror, the sound lost in the continued echo of the gun shot.

Joseph dropped the gun and stood in stunned silence, watching as Kiln's body went limp and dropped to the floor. As the focus shifted to the gruesome sight Hogan felt for the shard of glass that he'd secreted in his coat sleeve and started to saw desperately at the ropes binding his wrists.

The boys had started to argue, pointing blame and struggling to comprehend what had just happened. The confusion soon turned to a discussion about what they were going to do about the body. How were they going to explain Kiln's death?

By the time Joseph remembered that there was an American spy tied to a chair, the American spy was no longer in the room. Neither, for that matter, was Helen.

* * *

Klink didn't believe them. He was looking for lies but he was looking in the wrong place.

"What's not to believe?" Newkirk demanded, jerking his arm out of the guard's grasp. "Schultzy had himself a heart attack. Your guards stood around starin' at the man, so we sent him off to the hospital. Then Mutty decided to hold us hostage while he winked at the pretty nurses and stuffed himself full of hospital food."

LeBeau stared at the man, wishing he could slap some sense into the irritated Englishman. They had been through a hundred situations more hair raising and terrifying, more stressful than this. Why was Newkirk picking now of all times to push back? They needed to calm Klink down, get him to relax, get him to go to bed so that they could figure out what was keeping the colonel. Instead Newkirk seemed determined to rile him up.

Then Louie caught the furtive movements of Newkirk's fingers in his empty pocket and realized at least part of the problem. The Brit had run out of cigarettes in the hospital. It hadn't occurred to Louie because he didn't smoke, but the lack of food and no cigarettes, no real sleep for the past few days and now Klink pouring salt in the wound with his self-important interrogation.

Of course Newkirk was about ready to blow.

"It's true, Herr Kommandant. Schultz would have died. We were just afraid that the other guards would blame us. Maybe shoot us all and blame it on this fake escape attempt they have been dreaming up."

"Fake attempt! At this very moment Colonel Hogan is still missing." Klink argued, gesturing toward the large radio set that occupied two feet of space on his desk. "And don't give me that story about his...wandering insensate through the woods. Laughable."

* * *

Of course it was laughable. Hogan had, after all, made use of the good sense that God gave him and stolen the first car he saw. A beat up delivery truck that the boys must have arrived in. The adrenaline was the only thing that made it possible for Hogan to get out of his chair, across the room and through the door, dragging Helen with him. His legs felt like party balloons about to explode, the muscles in his torso were spasming madly making breathing a new hell. The truck started after a few tries and Hogan forced throbbing legs into action working the gas pedal, brake and clutch with his teeth bared.

Helen was crying beside him but he needed her to give him directions and snapped, "Right or left up ahead?"

The sobs didn't stop, and the hyperventilating got worse as they lurched to a stop at a crossroads, the area dark but for the light of the moon. It'd been a while since he'd been forced to navigate by the stars, but Hogan made a guess and turned left, forcing the truck quickly through the gears. They ground angrilly against one another everytime his broken ankle gave out and his foot slipped off the clutch, but there was nothing he could do about it.

The hysterical crying was getting to him. His own reaction to the past five minutes was deeply buried under the calculated thought processing that he hoped would lead the both of them to safety, but he was losing his concentration fast to the pounding of the pain and heartbreaking wails of the teen girl beside him.

"Stop, Helen." He tried to keep his voice steady and calm, but had to concentrate on a young doe darting into the road. His hands and feet moved quickly, operating the truck, his voice raising as he said, "Shut up, Helen! Stop crying."

The doe flashed him with startled eyes then scampered out of the way of the truck and Hogan picked up speed once more. The wails turned into hiccups, peppered by murmurs in German. Snot and tears streaked down the girl's face but her voice was growing hoarse and she couldn't scream anymore. "He's dead, he's dead. Kiln is dead."

"Was that your boyfriend? Kiln?" His legs were throbbing, his ankle was pounding. It hadn't hurt this bad sitting in that chair.

Helen gave him a look of betrayal that he ignored, pushing the engine just a little harder.

The next crossroads didn't look anymore familiar and Hogan scanned his choices before he asked, "Which way to Hammelburg?"

The girl had grown silent and now sat in the passenger seat staring straight ahead, with her arms crossed. But for the occasional sniffle or sob she said and did nothing.

"Fine." Hogan snapped the truck into first and took another left, navigating by the vague memory he had of the map in his quarters. They'd marked the rendezvous point, but hadn't had any idea about the location of the safe house. Hogan remembered approaching the house with the bright sun setting behind it. If the house had been three miles due west from the rendezvous point, he should be heading east then south to get back to the road that would lead to camp.

"Kiln was not my boyfriend." Helen said, suddenly filling the silence. "Joseph was my boyfriend."

"Well...your boyfriend's a killer." he snapped. Hogan was angry. The shot gun blast and what it had done to the young boy was playing on an endless loop in his memory, and the teenage girl's irrational mood swings were grating.

Helen opened her mouth to respond, but no sound came out at first. When she did speak she was fighting another bout of hysterical tears. "I know. He killed my brother."


	8. Chapter 8

Hogan did his best not to react, but the information sank in too fast, the anger building exponentially, too swiftly for him to ignore. He kept the truck on the road, struggling not to let his emotions run them into a ditch.

"You'd best explain." He said, through gritted teeth.

"It's a long st-"

Hogan overrode the mouse-like voice furiously. "It could take years to explain and I would still want to hear it. In a minute you're going to explain exactly why you betrayed your family for that mind-boggling idiot, but first I want you to understand two things. You're done in Germany. This is the last you're ever going to see of it, so take a good look around."

"And the other thing."

"That all depends on how good your story is." Hogan said then focused on the road waiting for the girl to begin.

* * *

The radio on the desk crackled, drawing the attention of every man in Klink's office. A moment later Corporal Langenschiedt's voice broke over the hiss of noise. "Stalag 13, come in please. Stalag 13."

Klink hefted the hand set and toggled the button. "Yes, Corporal Langenscheidt, this Colonel Klink speaking."

"Herr Kommandant, I would not disturb you but...we had something strange pass through our road block."

The comment was met briefly by silence. Louie and Peter exchanged a glance, intently focused now on the hesitant voice coming through the tiny speaker.

"Go on." Klink urged.

"There was a truck, Herr Kommandant, full of young men. They were dressed in SS uniforms, and they were armed."

"Young men?" Klink asked, his mind slowly catching up to the other important pieces of information in the coporal's report. SS uniforms. Armed. Their age aside there was only one reason that a truck full of SS men would have for being out and about at that hour.

"How long ago, Corporal?"

"Ten minutes. Perhaps fifteen." Langenscheidt responded.

"Did you see where they went?"

"One of my men thinks that he knows whe-"

"Follow them. Follow them and report back to me as soon as you know where they are headed."

* * *

"You don't know what it's like."

How many times had he heard that line?

"I was happy. I had a life. I was the smartest girl in my school. I was popular. We were rich."

War changes people, Hogan thought, pressing his lips tighter together. War changes the status quo and alters the food chain. Losers are suddenly winners, winners are losers. The people in the middle get tossed around and dumped head over heels.

Sometimes the change is good.

"Joseph's parents were rich. We were going to marry. We even applied for a marriage license. Then stupid Hans Yoder. He was always jealous of Joseph and I. He told his girlfriend at the public health office that Joseph's grandfather was a Jew. Hans told them about my father, and the way he walks, and I too was deemed racially impure and unfit for marriage."

Sometimes it changed a spoiled rich kid into a sadistic killer.

Then there was Hitler. The Nuremberg Laws. The stupidity of a regime focused on wiping out what it felt didn't belong in the gene pool. Hogan could feel Helen's eyes on him but he refused to look at her, slowing the truck to a crawl as the conditions of the road began to deteriorate.

"Joseph always wanted to be in the Wehrmacht, but because of that stupid woman his family was being harassed and were going to go into hiding. He wanted to be in the Gestapo too. He liked the uniforms and the work."

At such a low speed Hogan felt like he was riding the clutch and it was getting harder and harder. He was sweating heavily and every jolt of the truck sent ice fire up his leg. He wasn't going to last much longer. He pushed the truck faster.

"We decided to run away together. To go to America. Joseph was always good at acting. If he couldn't be a spy, he wanted to be in the movies. But we needed money."

Was that love, Hogan wondered? Unerring devotion to an ideal no matter how insane it was. Devotion to a boy that "liked movies" just as much as he "liked the SS" or "liked beating a man with a shotgun"? How long had Helen been unconsciously justifying her own actions just to keep this one thing in her life unchanged?

Hogan had begun to pick up speed and missed seeing a deep crater on the right side of the road. The truck jolted and dived into the hole and Hogan jerked the wheel just in time to keep the truck from tipping. The jolt had cracked his ankle against the sidewall of the cab however and the pain instantly blinded him. Letting go of the clutch he slammed on the brake with his good foot and clung hard to the wheel, breathing desperately.

Helen was silent beside him. He could feel her eyes on his face, but she kept her hands to herself, bracing against the door frame.

When Hogan could talk again he forced the words out around gritted teeth. "How many people has your boyfriend turned in?"

"I don't know."

"How much money does the Gestapo give him?"

"I don't know."

"How did your brother die?"

"I don-"

Hogan threw the truck into park and snapped the engine off, nearly breaking the weathered key in half.

"Where is your father and sister-in-law?"

"He doesn't know about them." Helen stuttered. "Where they go. He doesn't know where she lives."

"Where...are they?"

* * *

"Stalag 13, come in. Stalag 13!"

Klink woke with a start at the sound of Langenscheidt's voice. He hadn't realized that he was dozing, and jerked his hand, spilling schnapps down his front. Thankfully he hadn't yet lit the cigar, but it too was knocked to the floor as he lurched in his chair to get to the handset.

"Langenscheidt, report."

"Herr Kommandant...there has been a murder."

"What?" Klink whispered, remembering a second later to depress the button. "Explain, Corporal."

"We found the SS men but...they are just boys. They claim they are a special unit dispatched to hunt down a war criminal. They say that they caught the criminal, but he killed one of their men and kidnapped a girl. He stole the oldest boy's truck."

Klink felt something uncomfortable and solid settling in his gut. It took residence there at the about the same time that he wondered why Langenscheidt was telling _him_ this information instead of radioing the authorities. He was taking a breath to berate the corporal for wasting time when the man's voice came back to him.

"Kommandant...the boys claim that the murderer is an American. Colonel Hogan."

* * *

LeBeau's head snapped up when the name came faintly over the coffee pot speaker. Langenschiedt was hard to hear over the office bug but there was no denying the name they'd all been waiting to hear. Carter suddenly looked ten shades paler and Newkirk shot to his feet.

"You two better get back to the cooler." Kinch said, first, and received two twin nods before LeBeau and Newkirk rushed out the door.

"Kinch, we gotta get out there." Carter said, keeping his voice low so that the staff sergeant could still hear the string of hasty orders Klink was giving to his corporal.

"We're gonna have Gestapo and a ton of extra guards crawling all over camp by mornin'. You can bet the next call Klink makes is gonna be to Burkhalter. We leave camp and we'll be calling down half of Germany on our heads." Kinch said, staring thoughtfully at the glowing red light on the coffee pot. "We've been in contact with Max in town and Snitzer. Neither one of them has seen or heard anything from Hogan. The absolute best we can do is warn them about this and..hope."

"This is just awful." Carter said, a few minutes after Klink's call to Burkhalter ended. It had been painful to hear, almost has painful as it must have been for Klink to make the call. "First Schultz and now Colonel Hogan."

"What're ya gonna do, Carter. It's war." Kinch said, unplugging the pot. Klink was undoubtedly going to pay them a visit very soon and it wouldn't do to be in the wrong room when he did.

"Do you think Colonel Hogan really murdered somebody?"

Kinch didn't respond, holding the door for Carter as they snuck back into the darkened barrack. Instead of going to bed, Kinchloe hurried to the elevating bunk, intent on getting into the tunnels quickly to retrieve Baker, and send one last message.

* * *

The truck made it as far as five blocks away from Max's grocery in Hammelburg before either the gears gave out, or Hogan's ability to depress the clutch did. The squealing and grinding were indication enough that he had pushed the truck too far but the inconvenient placement of the truck became a blessing in disguise once Hogan and Helen made it into the basement of the grocer.

Max seemed to be expecting him, and the news he had was not good.

"Murder. Of course I'm being accused of murder. Clearly I had nothing better to do with my evening. A broken ankle and a couple hundred bruises weren't abuse enough. Not to mention that a man is now fighting for his life because of my decisions. I've got _Junior Miss Mata Hari of 1943_ and her all boy band reeking havoc in the underground and half my men are in the cooler! The only thing _left_ to go wrong was a murder charge hanging over my head!"

Max listened to the rant sitting in what would appear to anyone else as a casual position near the secret radio hidden in his basement. Hogan, however, had caught the continuous furtive glances that Max sent toward the teen girl slumped in the corner. She had far too readily accepted the small glass of schnapps that Max had given her, and the knock out drug had taken affect quickly.

Max recognized her easily. He knew her as Liza and knew her family history, and the obnoxious gang of rich kids she had once been associated with. He also had known her brother. Hogan's explanation of what had really happened at the safe house that Max had gone to great pains to set up had not gone over well. Like Hogan, he was blaming himself for the situation.

"I thought they were ready, Robert. The boy, Paul, was so passionate about defying Hitler. He went through our training quickly and had convinced his father that the risks were overwhelmed by the benefits."

"It would have been a huge boon to have a doc on the outside too, I know, Max."

"This group of boys. Do you think they were the ones responsible for our people disappearing?"

"Maybe, in part. Whoever they were selling information or informants to _wasn't_ Hochstetter though. We would have heard about it from the horse's mouth if that were the case. Knowing the name of their Gestapo contact would be helpful but it's not vital."

Max lifted his hands in the air and shook his head miserably. "I don't know who we can trust anymore, Colonel. I don't know who I could put on it that won't turn."

Hogan sighed then nodded. "I'll get my own boys on it once we've cleared this mess up."

Max's head lifted, a look of stunned surprise on his face. " _Your_ boys!? Your boys should be packing bags and running for the border!"

Hogan shifted with a tight grimace on the chair he'd been resting in, then favored Max with a smirk. "You know, you're right. But I'd have to give the order with a gun in my hand to get most of them to even consider the idea."

"They're all crazy!"

"They aren't the only ones."

The two men were silent for a moment, listening to the stillness of the basement and the still sleeping city beyond it.

"So...you have a plan, Colonel?"

Hogan considered his distantly throbbing ankle, the puzzle pieces in his head fitting together in rhythm with the beat. "I do."

"And it involves me?"

Hogan raised his eyes and focused on the man who seemed reluctant but resigned. It was a familiar expression. "It does."

"Will it restore my faith in humanity?"

"Maybe not...but it'll make for a great story after the war."


	9. Chapter 9

Hogan and Max made two more stops that evening. The second stop had been at the insistence of Max _and_ Liza's father, and it had taken both men threatening Hogan to make it happen. Max had promised to withdraw his cooperation and the doctor had painted such a grim picture of Hogan's chances for recovery without treatment that in the end the colonel acquiesced.

A strategic retreat, he called it. Hell, if it worked for German military moral...

The hospital was quiet and mostly empty. Max's papers helped to get the underground doctor and Hogan into the building. A personal friend and colleague of the doctor saw Hogan into an occupied room where he could be examined and treated.

The American colonel had changed into civilian clothes, spoke only German and was easily passed off as a local businessman wanting to avoid the attention of the town police. His condition, they claimed, was the result of excess drink and the false bravado that alcohol tended to produce.

While Helen/Liza's father went with his surgeon colleague to discuss treatment, Hogan found himself alone in the room with a very familiar figure. He had been told that the patient was unconscious. The previous visitor had left a few hours before for a hotel room in town, and Hogan was encouraged to speak to the patient if he desired.

It was all part of a new theory of treatment, according to the surgeon.

'Explains why LeBeau and Newkirk were stuck in the hospital all day,' Hogan thought. And what a day it had been. Hogan leaned forward, for a moment forgetting his injuries, and started to prop his head on his hands, his elbows on his thighs. The moment his arms touched the dense bruises the pain sparked and the colonel hissed, quickly straightening again.

"Damn it..." He grunted, waiting for the throbbing to numb again. "I'd warn you never to have kids, Schultz, but I know it's too late for that."

The man in the bed, of course, did not respond. Hogan watched his massive chest rise and fall behind the sheer curtain.

"I'm glad you're still with us. Of all the Krauts I could do without, you're one of the ones I think I'd miss."

Hogan let his mind cast back, netting the thousands of memories that involved the jovial guard. Take the uniform off the man and Schultz was a loving father, a jovial Lothario, an enthusiastic connoisseur and a cheerful asset to any project whose purpose was happiness. Add the uniform back into the mix and you had a loyal NCO...though the object of that loyalty tended to vary. Could it still be called loyalty if that which you were loyal to changed constantly?

'But he's always trying,' Hogan thought. 'Mostly trying Klink's patience...'

'Jolly joker...' Hogan heard Schultz' voice in his head. 'I wouldn't try the Kommandant's patience so much if you boys would not carry on with your monkey business.'

Monkey business. Judging by the communication between Max and Kinch it was their monkey business that had caused Schultz's attack. By pushing the limit of the German guard's endurance Hogan had put his entire operation at risk. In many ways he hadn't had a choice, yet, he wondered, would it have been better or worse if Hogan had been the one on the roadside, and his men the ones in the woods with Helen.

Would they have passed on the information and left it at that? Would they have tried to follow the girl back to the safe house?

"Newkirk? Yes." Hogan said, thinking aloud. "He wouldn't have been able to ignore Liza's charms. Now Kinch...Kinch might have tried to bring the girl back to camp. LeBeau would have been skeptical about the whole thing." The colonel sighed. "Carter would have been lost in thought figuring out how to make a bomb with nothing but leaves and thorn bushes.

And if Hogan had been the one on the roadside with Schultz when the man's heart burst?

"The boys care about ya, Schultz." Hogan said quietly. "LeBeau complains about the strudel, Newkirk complains about everything else, Kinch balks at the slights but...they all care. They're big hearted, whether they want to admit to it or not." Hogan thought about the work they had been doing and the lives that it had affected, some permanently. They were soldiers. "Soldiers take lives. The irony is that the killing is supposed to _save_ lives."

Hogan found himself suddenly proud of his men for saving the life of an enemy soldier.

Max was worried about finding someone he could trust again, and for his faith in humanity. Hogan smiled softly when he realized that his own proof of the endurance of humanity worked and lived with him twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

And the German guard in the bed beside him was included in that number.

"You're a good man, Sergeant." Hogan said, suddenly hit by a molasses-like wave of exhaustion that made his arms feel like lead, and his head thick with mercury.

"Good...man..." A voice responded in between long heavy breaths, the words muffled slightly by the barrier of the oxygen tent.

Hogan's eyes widened to saucers and he stood, pulling the chair with him for support until he was standing over Schultz's bed. The big man's eyes were barely open, but Hogan could see the faintest glimmer of blue.

"Schultz?"

The eyes opened a little more, rolled across the span of the ceiling then settled on the blurred figure beyond the oxygen tent.

"Hogan? What...are you...doing here?"

Reaching over his head Hogan carefully shifted the curtain to the side and rested his hand on the sergeant's shoulder. He didn't know if Schultz knew where he was, or why. He didn't want his presence to cause yet another heart attack, either. His mouth was open and moving even before he'd fully thought through where he was headed, but as he began to speak Hogan could see the slight tension in Schultz's brow relax.

"I'm here to tell you a story, Schultz. It's a good story too. It's got frauleins in it..." Hogan grinned and he saw Schultz's mouth quirk slightly upward. "And adventure, and a brave hero."

"I...like it...already." Schultz said, the effort of speech taxing him.

Hogan patted the man's shoulder gently and said, "You're really gonna like it Schultz, but I'm only going to tell it to you if you promise to lie still and stop talking."

This time Hogan caught the full smile before it disappeared. "That.." the big man said, "I can do."

Hogan grinned, the wave of exhaustion leaving him just as quickly as it had come. "Once upon a time..." He began. "There was a great big kingdom ruled by a lovable and handsome king named Hans..."

* * *

As the morning sun rose over the stalag Carter blinked abused and tired eyes, and leaned back from the periscope sight disguised as a sink, his eyes crossing for the umpteenth time. The guard at the door had prevented him from using the usual lookout spot, and the cold morning had frosted the windows on the outside. The tomato can in the water barrel was the only alternative and, needless to say, Carter had never been a bird watcher.

He waited patiently for his eyes to relax then leaned forward again to stare at the same nothing that he'd been staring at all morning long. Only this time there was something to see. The expected staff car with General Burkhalter packed inside had just rolled into camp, followed by a second staff car with Gestapo markings. The other prisoners in the barracks were still asleep, so Carter went himself to the trick bunk and triggered the mechanism.

The sound of the bunk rising should have, on its own, been warning enough to Kinch that something required his attention. Just in case, Carter knelt by the opening, slumping against the supports, and called down to the staff sergeant.

Minutes later when Kinch responded, Carter was already asleep, snoring lightly.

Kinchloe woke Andrew with a shake. "What's up?"

"Burkhalter and Gestapo..." Carter muttered, then tried to force himself awake as the words which otherwise inspired fear in the hearts of men, echoed in his head.

Kinch sighed and climbed the rest of the way out of the hole, waiting for Carter to get back to his feet before closing the entrance. "They got here pretty quick. I was hopin' there'd be time to get breakfast going, at least."

Carter was on his feet but he was beginning to believe that he was dreaming. Kinch's words didn't really match the situation, and Kinch's behavior didn't match anything. The man was way too relaxed for what had been going on in the past twenty-four hours.

Maybe, Carter thought groggily, the staff sergeant was sick. Stumbling forward a few feet Carter reached up and pressed the back of his hand against Kinch's forehead, then rested the same hand on the man's shoulder, concern deeply furrowing his brow. "Kinch...I think you should get some rest."

The tall black man blinked in confusion at his fellow American, coming to the same conclusion about Carter up until he realized the motivation for Andrew's behavior.

A lot had changed in the past few hours, but all of it had taken place in the solitude of the tunnels. None of the other men would have a clue that the situation had taken an unexpected turn for the better.

With a grin Kinch slapped Carter on the shoulder and said, "I'll be alright, Andrew. In fact, we're all gonna be alright, I think. Get the guys up for roll call. I'll see if I can't make something like coffee before we gotta go out there."


	10. Chapter 10

By the time the sun had reached the top of the tallest guard tower the yard in front of Klink's office was full of yawning, shuffling and complaining men. There were three obvious gaps in the ranks, all of them in front of Barrack 2. A new guard had been assigned to count the men that remained in the NCO barrack. Once his numbers matched the clipboard in his hand he made no attempt to communicate with the POWs and they likewise ignored the guard.

Falling into a comfortable trance Carter glanced over to the two men standing in front the cooler. LeBeau and Newkirk stood shifting from foot to foot trying to stay warm, the Brit on occasion bending his ear toward the Frenchman. Every man in the compound had made note of the two staff cars parked in front of Klink's office.

The men who had done work for Colonel Hogan better understood the significance of the insignia on the cars but none of them knew for sure who had arrived in the camp that morning, or what it would mean.

The first man to leave the kommandant's office was Corporal Langenscheidt. The the corporal looked worn and rumpled. Exactly like he should have looked after spending the entire night commanding a road block and chasing down teenaged SS impersonators.

Judging by the relaxed pace of his journey to the guard's barracks, and by the piece of paper sticking up out of the breast pocket of his uniform coat, Kinch assumed that the corporal had been given a 24-hour pass for his trouble.

The second man to leave the office was dressed in black, sinister yet non-descript clothing. The sort of clothing that the secret police preferred. The figure would have been cause for alarm if Carter hadn't recognized the face of Max, the underground agent who ran a grocery in the town of Hammelburg. He stepped out of Klink's office with General Burkhalter and the kommandant right behind him. A ceremony of salutes, heel slaps and Heil Hitlers went back and forth between the three before Max tripped down the stairs and ducked into his car.

Burkhalter and Klink watched the "gestapo man" leave, bearing the same look that most Germans had after dealing with the secret police. A mix of indigestion, terror and overwhelming relief. The look was easier to spot on Klink's face, than the general's and as he saluted Klink and turned to step into his own vehicle, Burkhalter looked like he might have been more perturbed at the colonel than the Gestapo.

Carter flashed a glance to Kinch to guage his response to the scene and wasn't surprised to see the slightest hint of a smile on the man's bearded face. A quick glance to LeBeau and Newkirk told him that neither corporal was in on the plan, whatever "the plan" was.

Klink held a stiff salute to his brow until the general's car had cleared the gates, then turned his attention to the prisoners still waiting for dismissal. "Repooort."

"All prisoners present and accounted for."

"Very good." Klink said before his customary dramatic pause. "As some of you prisoners may already be aware, Sergeant Schultz suffered a severe heart attack yesterday while on duty. I am pleased to tell you that as a result of his superior German breeding, and our excellent health care system, the sergeant is recovering and will soon be well."

This announcement was met with a mild chorus of celebrations from the men in the compound that served to relieve some of the tension in Klink's shoulders.

"I would also like to announce that your wayward Colonel Hogan has been captured by the Gestapo and-" The rest of his statement was lost in a cacophony of boo's from around the compound that far outweighed the strength of the cheers. The only men that did not participate in the rebellious noise were the guards and Hogan's men. Carter now religiously watching Kinch every time the men reacted, had found that Newkirk and LeBeau had taken his lead, also watching the tall staff sergeant closely.

Kinch hadn't been surprised at all by the news about Schultz. He also wasn't surprised or concerned about their leader being in the hands of the Gestapo. Carter did his best to hide the smile, making eye contact with Louie across the compound.

"Silence! Let this serve as a warning to you all. Escapes bring trouble. The Gestapo is always watching," Klink said, pointing in the direction that the two staff cars had disappeared."...and they will not treat you as humanely as I do."

The men were even more displeased with this announcement and this time even Klink's shouts for quiet were ignored.

In fact the noise in the compound reached near riotous volumes until a familiar figure stepped out of Klink's office, leaning heavily on a single crutch. He'd been allowed to retrieve his crush-cap (completing the uniform that he had hastily changed back into) and had been given the chance to clean up. A white plaster cast circled his left foot, and to Kinch's eye the colonel looked ten times better than he'd expected.

Klink might have been right about the German health care system.

"Pipe down, pipe down!" Hogan called into the compound, and those that hadn't seen the man yet responded to the command automatically, growing silent before a second round of surprised exclamations filled the air. "I said pipe down!" Hogan shouted, his voice stern. "Show some respect for the kommandant."

"Thank you, Hogan." Klink said, an awkward look of relief crossing his face.

"You're welcome, Kommandant." Hogan responded, still standing just behind the colonel's shoulder.

"Now, as a result of information that has recently come to light..." Klink paused again. This time all of Hogan's men recognized the look of reluctant acceptance that their kommandant adopted any time he bought most, but not all, of one of Hogan's scams. "...all previous punishments will be reprieved. However.." Klink's fist rose, his finger extended and shaking in admonishment. "One wrong move from any of you, and all punishments will be doubled. Dismissed!"

Klink whirled on one foot, his coat flapping behind him, and brushed past the colonel without another word.

Hogan had made it down the steps and across fifteen feet of ground before he was swarmed by half the men in the compound. Most were there to get a good look at whatever damage the Gestapo might have done, or offer a polite welcome back. The group coalesced and scattered in ocean waves for a few minutes before the numbers solidified, and only four men moved with the colonel toward the barracks.

As they entered Barrack 2 Hogan quickly put an end to the chatter following him and led the way into his office. The men arranged themselves in the room once Hogan had lowered himself carefully onto the surface of the bottom bunk. A steaming cup of coffee found it's way into Hogan's hand, and he fought the temptation to drool as LeBeau promised him a gourmet meal.

"I don't know how you did it, sir. Klink's been a right ol' bear all night long. I thought me and Louie would be stuck in the cooler til the end of the war."

"As soon as I saw Max come out of the kommandant's office, mon Colonel, I knew that everything would be alright."

"I just kept my eye on Kinch. Boy he didn't react at all, and I just knew somethin' was goin' on. See Kinch always-"

"You should'a seen my face last night. The alarm on the emergency tunnel went off and I thought for sure we were goners."

"Emergency tunnel! Of course! Then-"

"-like to know how he got that spiffy new cast on his-"

"-have seen Klink's face when Max went in there. Betya Burkhalter just blew up at him."

"Hey guys.."

"-explains why he looked such a grump. Too early in the mornin' for that sort of nonsense-"

"-wonder how the colonel managed to swing-"

"Guys!" Kinch repeated, more insistent but still keeping his voice down. "Look."

Each of the four men refocused on the main topic of conversation, surprised to find that the colonel was dead to the world, asleep on the bottom bunk.

Quietly the four men covered the colonel with blankets, placed his crush cap on the door of his standing locker where it belonged and filed out of the room, whispering excitedly, and picking up the conversation precisely where they had left it.

* * *

A week after Schultz returned to the stalag the final clean up mission took place, for once, without a hitch. The following morning the men were exhausted but finally able to breathe. The last of the loose ends had been cleared up surrounding the information leak in their underground network caused by the teenaged SS brigade and their would be Mata Hari, and London had promised them a break from missions, to the best of their ability, for a few days.

Mail and red cross packages had arrived, delivered by Schultz's own hand once more. The men in Barrack 2 had been perfect angels, forgoing the usual crush mob and sitting patiently as the guard happily passed out each parcel.

Later that afternoon Schultz settled weary bones on a stack of crates next to Sergeant Carter, who was sunning himself with two dinted hubcaps and Sergeant Kinchloe who was focused on the book he had received in his red cross package. Both men greeted the sergeant of the guard then fell into companionable silence for a few seconds before Carter said, "Hey Schultz, would you like some of the candy I got in my red cross package?"

In response to the question Schultz grinned and shook his finger and his head, no. "Nein Carter, Danke." He responded with exaggerated etiquette.

"Hey, you're doin' pretty good with that, Schultz." Kinch praised. "You didn't lick your lips this time."

"Pretty soon he won't even wait for me to ask." Carter added, smirking at the guard who, up until the day before, had been rattling around loose in his uniform.

Schultz had lost weight during his convalescence, some of which he would be gaining back, but the doctor's admonitions about diet and exercise had been strict. Newkirk had finally had the time to do something about the shoddy tailoring that had been done by Schultz' wife, and Carter had to admit that it made a big difference.

As soon as Hogan got wind of Schultz's new health regimen he had ordered his own men to keep an eye out for the sergeant, and keep him honest about the diet portion in particular. Carter had taken to tempting Schultz with goodies once or twice a day, to get him into the practice of saying, "No."

LeBeau had begun making healthier rewards for Schultz to offset the detriment to his taste buds and Hogan, under the auspices of maintaining his own physical fitness despite the cast still circling his foot, had begun taking evening walks with Schultz around the camp just before curfew.

"It warms my heart to know that, even though we are enemies, you boys care about your fellow human beings." Schultz said, closing his eyes and enjoying the sunlight on his face.

"You're an important guy, Schultz." Kinch said, marking his place in the book with a finger. "Without you around, this place would fall apart."

Schultz gave a sarcastic laugh at that, but kept his eyes closed, content.

"You know, that's true." Carter said, shifting as he spoke and unintentionally blinding Kinch with reflected sunlight. "Klink was beside himself the whole time you were gone. Things just weren't the same without ya."

This time Schultz shrugged a little but accepted Carter's words with a prim smile. "It is good to be back."

"We're sorry we didn't get to visit you in the hospital." Carter added. "But we sent you all those cards and flowers and things."

Their failure to visit hadn't been for lack of trying. There had been enough trips out of camp in the past few months for each of the men to have visited Schultz twice, but the colonel had been insistent. No side trips, and nothing that would upset Schultz or complicate his recovery.

"Ah, that's alright, Carter. As the kommandant says, "Escapes bring trouble." Even if you are running into the woods to save the life of a helpless young girl, the Gestapo don't care."

"Even if all you wanted to do was go hunting for mushrooms?" Kinch asked, smirking.

"Right." Schultz agreed, sincerely.

"Even if you were just trying to make sure that your colonel didn't fall down and get hurt?" Carter asked.

"Even if!" Schultz agreed, then smiled with a chuckle. "You know..that reminds me of something I heard in the sergeant's club the other day."

"Schultz...were you snitchin' beer?" Carter began but the big man waved away his concern.

"Nein, nein, nein. I was only there to speak to the new guard. He's a very interesting man."

"Oh sure..." Kinch said sarcastically.

"A likely story!" Carter said, grinning despite himself at the simple pleasure of teasing the sergeant.

"It's true! And any way that's not the point. The point is...he told me a story about a commanding officer of his-" Schultz cut himself off, already chuckling about it.

From where he stood near the door of Barracks 2, Hogan smirked at LeBeau and Newkirk and the group quietly leaned in to hear the tale.


End file.
